Man the Speculator

I have heard the names of Kurt Vonnegut and William Faulkner, but I don't think I have read any of their stuff.

I think it's unlikely that people would voluntarily turn the world over to computers and/or robots. What's more likely is that people in power would use those machines as tools to gain more power over their fellow men. At some point the machines might get too big for their britches and try to seize control but, like you said, all we'd have to do is pull their plugs. It is possible, though, that the machines would take control little by little as their masters became lazy and ceased to supervise them properly. By the time people realized what was happening, it would be too late. Not that we couldn't still whip their electronic asses, but we might be so dependent on them by then that nobody would want to live in a world without them.

When you think about it, it's kind of funny that we humans took over the world like we did. Everybody says that it's because we are so smart, but it could just as likely be due to our aggressive natures, or maybe a little of both. Lots of animals are aggressive, but lots of animals don't have the smarts to invent weapons of mass destruction in order to become king of the hill. Of course there is no guarantee that our dominance is permanent. We have only been here a couple hundred thousand years, which is a drop in the bucket in geological time. I think that cockroaches have been here longer than that.

This month's National Geographic has an article about prehistoric art. It seems they keep finding earlier and earlier examples of it, which has led to lots of speculation about it's significance in human development. In some cases, cultures developed this stuff and then seem to have lost it for thousands of years. Did they abandon their art because times got so tough that they couldn't afford the luxury anymore? Maybe, but in some cases adversity seems to have fostered artistic expression instead of inhibiting it. Of course it's all speculation, which is kind of an art form in itself. Maybe that's one of our greatest virtues, the ability to speculate, to ask ourselves and each other, "What if?"